Cologne, 19 September 1996
I can appreciate Chris with the lava lamp (what is a lava lamp? for volcanic
personalities?) getting nervous about notions of personal truth.
Chris Morrissey:
"I appreciate your seriousness, by the way. Your posts are high quality..."
Been living in Germany for too long. Thanks for the compliment. I don't know
whether I can love you after all that has happened between us.
Chris M.:
"A dangerous move when it becomes popularized! I don't want rock stars quoting
Heidegger like they do Nietzsche..."
So truth gets rolled out thinly, as flat as a pancake, generally accepted as
self-evident. Thus transformed into intersubjective truth, effortlessly capable
of consensus, truth becomes -- 'falsity'?? Truth, once cast inscriptively by
those whose ears were turned to the wind of beyng, settles like dust,
imperceptibly and silently, in the mundane world, holding it open in its
obviousness.
Like Nietzsche says: Thoughts that come on pigeon's feet move the world.
Chris M.:
"So writing is ambiguous. It's no guarantee that thought will be transmitted.
This seems to me to be a pretty obvious point. Still, I guess philosophy has to
nurture the obvious and think carefully about it!"
It seems to me that writing is no more ambiguous than the "warm wind" (Rafael
Capurro) of speech. But it goes far further than ambiguity: The draft of the
world cast by a thinker destroys a previous world (the thinker acting only as
the casting agent of beyng). Since all understanding rests on and resides within
an understanding of being, an historical shift in the casting of the being of
beings has no ground to stand on. The thinker has to be a kind of quicksand
artist, casting out planks over the groundlessness of propriation.
Pointing out the obvious is indeed the task of thinking. The obvious has to be
pointed to and prodded until it finally becomes strange and questionable and
astonishing. Being and our understanding of it are so close to us, so obvious,
that it takes a heavy thinker not in his/her(?) right mind to gain a distance.
This is why the thinking of being is not gnosticism. The truth it points to is
staring us literally in the face. But it takes a circuitous route through the
tradition to realize how astonishing the mundane world is in its mundaneness.
Read with this in mind, Heidegger's 'Gelassenheit' (Releasement, Letting-be)
text loses any gnostic-mystical flavour it may have.
Michael
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